OPENING SEGMENT- decent
Kurt Angle comes out to announce who Roman Reigns will defend the IC Title against. Corey Graves points out the fans chanting “YOU SUCK!” at Kurt and notes that “only in WWE is that a sign of respect.” This is something that crowds (full of idiots who just like chanting things and don’t realize that people only really chanted “YOU SUCK!” at Kurt when he was a heel) have been doing every week since Kurt came back in April, but a statement like Corey’s has rarely ever been made. And considering that WWE knows that fans chanting “YOU SUCK!” as a term of endearment could be confusing, and yet they’re only choosing to make a big point of saying this now, I’m willing to guess that the reason for this isn’t that they only just figured out that it could be confusing and more that they’re now trying to use it to blur the perception to the viewing audience that fans might legitimately dislike some other babyface who they chant “YOU SUCK!” at. Yes, that’s right. Kurt Angle’s “YOU SUCK!” chants are just the latest thing that Vince is attempting to use to create the perception that all of the fans absolutely love Roman Reigns.
Kurt starts to announce who is going to get the title shot “based on what happened last week” but he is interrupted by Jason Jordan, who says that he should get the title shot. Kurt’s response to this is that Jason can’t have the title shot. Is it because he’s lost his last two matches (and a lot more than that if we’re counting house shows)? Of course not. That would make sense. Kurt tells Jason that he can’t have a title shot because his knee still isn’t healed. You know… the same issue he had last week, and yet Kurt still let him go out and wrestle Kane.
Jason pled his case, pointing out that he has “been in the ring with Roman Reigns, John Cena, Braun Strowman, Kane, The Miz- and I’ve held my own with every last one of them.” Anyone want to guess what Jason Jordan’s combined singles record is against the five wrestlers he just named? It’s 1-5, with his only singles victory being against The Miz. By DQ. And he lost the rematch (by the way, if we include multi-man tags, Jason Jordan’s record becomes 2-6, including one where he got pinned cleanly by Miz, which also took place after his most recent victory against The Miz). Because it’s not winning that’s important; it’s trying your hardest. If winning doesn’t matter, why should I care who wins any of the matches? If Jason get this match tonight and Roman beats him but Jason is able to “hold his own” will he and Roman become co-champions?
Now, to be fair to Jason, his singles loss to Miz was not a clean loss… but Jason doesn’t even mention that here, and you’d think that if getting another shot at the Prestigious WWE Intercontinental Title was so important to Jason he would have said something about that at some point in the two and a half months since that match happened at No Mercy. But no. Jason decided that instead of coming on TV and calling Miz out for his cheating and demanding a rematch, he would come out on TV and be a dick to The Drifter and throw vegetables at him for no reason.
Jason Jordan says that Roman had issued an open challenge, which he did in fact do last week… except that Roman is only allowed to issue open challenges when Kurt- the guy whose job it is to book the show- lets him do it, so if Kurt has someone in particular he wants Roman to face then Roman is going to defend the belt against the guy Kurt wants, not whoever happens to come out and say they want it first.
Roman comes out and says that he’s not defending his title against f*cking Jason Jordan, and suggests that if Jason wants an opportunity he should earn it rather than asking his daddy to just give it to him. Jason Jordan responds by saying it is ridiculous for Roman to lecture anyone about “earning” things and points out that Roman is exactly the posterchild for what WWE looks for in a wrestler. This segment has morphed into the ultimate decider of who is the bigger failure: we’ve got the two top flopped babyfaces of 2017 facing off in a promo segment in which Creative has finally booked Roman to act like an actual babyface instead of a smug, self-important asshole who thinks he is above the law, and they have booked Jason Jordan to cut a worked shoot promo on Roman. I can just see the Creative meeting where they explain the reasoning for this to Vince by simply saying “this has to get at least one them to get cheered, right?”
The answer is Roman, apparently. Joe then came out and got cheered even more than the two of them put together. He offered Roman the chance to save himself the embarrassment and forfeit the title. Before Roman could respond, Jason Jordan opened his mouth and started off by saying “Hey Joe! I don’t have to try to come out here and talk tough.” Everyone booed Jason Jordan, while cameras made sure to get a good close-up first of Joe laughing dismissively at Jason, and then of Roman with a completely baffled expression on his face where you could almost see the thought bubble above his head asking “is this idiot being serious right now?” Jason Jordan managed to call out Samoa Joe for attacking Roman Reigns from behind and yet still come off like a total heel during all of this.
Roman then spoke, basically ignoring everything Jason Jordan had said and responded to Joe by daring Joe to come get him (I’m generalizing here. The actual dialogue between Joe and Roman was actually quite great. Joe had given Roman five seconds to decide to forfeit the match before Joe would come down to the ring and kick his ass, and Roman’s response was to point out that “the five seconds are done” and get ready for a fight)… but then Jason Jordan grabbed Roman from behind and gave him a belly-to-belly suplex. Kurt started to push Jason away from Roman and told him to go to the back… but this angered Roman enough to say that he wanted to face Jordan right now instead of Joe, who he said he would face later tonight, and Kurt made the match official.
My objections to the interaction between Kurt and Jason aside, this was actually a pretty good segment. Roman and Joe were both great, and everything Jason Jordan said and did does make sense as part of a prolonged heel turn. I highly doubt WWE will do it, but if I’m booking this and my goal is to set up a situation where everyone but Kurt sees Jason Jordan as the heel and Kurt just wants to see the best in his son, then I would have Jason Jordan win here due to a distraction by Joe (who is angry that Roman as given in and given Jason Jordan a title shot before him) so that Jason can tell Kurt “see! I told you I would be able to win the title if I was given the chance” but the rest of us will all know that Jason wouldn’t have won without Joe’s distraction and thus him bragging about his win would be heelish.

WWE INTERCONTINENTAL TITLE MATCH: Roman Reigns(c) vs. Jason Jordan- 8/10
This an AWESOME opener! It started off with Roman beating the sh*t out of Jordan and basically treating him like the little punk he was acting like, but then Jordan got some offense in and worked over Roman’s midsection until Jordan aggravated his knee injury so Roman started to focus on that. I don’t ever remember seeing Roman Reigns use a submission hold before but holy crap that struggle they had in the half-crab was awesome! Jordan once again countered a Superman Punch to cut Roman off and they had me biting on non-finishers like Jordan’s chain northern lights suplexes. Jordan’s selling was excellent, and the spear that finally ended that match was one of those “that’s it. It’s definitely over now” finishers that has that sense of finality to it which is often missing in today’s wrestling.

POST-MATCH SEGMENT- Joe announced his intentions to assault Roman and did so, but Jason Jordan snuck in and broke up the attempted Coquina Clutch by giving Joe a suplex. This was fine until Jordan got involved. I’m really not sure what the purpose of keeping Jordan involved in this is now that he just lost clean to Roman. And then it got much worse when Roman nailed Jason Jordan- the man who just saved him- with a sucker-Superman Punch. What an ungrateful asshole! Yes, Jordan attacked Roman from behind earlier tonight, but Roman already got his revenge on Jordan for that when he just beat him in that excellent wrestling match we just saw!

JASON JORDAN BEGS KURT ANGLE FOR MATCHES- he wants another match with Roman, and also wants to be in the Roman vs. Joe match that is apparently actually happening later tonight. Kurt says fine to putting him in the Joe match, but then yells at Jason Jordan for coming in here and demanding things from him. Then Samoa Joe ran in and threw Jason Jordan into a wall.

PAIGE (w/Sonya Deville & Mandy Rose) vs. SASHA BANKS (w/Mickie James & Bayley)- 7/10
They showed some Tweets from these women from this past week. Paige’s had her typical “MY house” catchphrase in it, and Sasha replied to that by saying “time to burn your house down,” so I guess she’s a Randy Orton fan.
Alexa Bliss! was on commentary for the match involving these two groups for the seconds straight week, once again proving that “Creative” is a rather in appropriate name for the people who write this show. She was excellent the whole time. The best moment was when Cole tried to mock her bullsh*t excuse for running away from the Girl-rillas of Destiny last week by asking her if she would have any more “champ business” to take care of during this week’s match, which Alexa responded to by having the most wonderful look of shocked and almost outrages and telling Cole “you are so rude.” This was made even better by Corey Graves scolding Cole for this and saying it was Cole’s fault that they didn’t have guest on commentary more often because of things like this.
The match itself was very good as well. They were given a good fifteen minutes to do their thing and they were allowed to do it pretty much cleanly. Sasha took some scary bumps. She’s going to get hurt very badly one day. The New Paige Outlaws beat up Mickie and Bayley on the outside, and Paige was able to capitalize off of Sasha being momentarily distracted by this to take over and get the win. D-Gyneration X beat Sasha down after the match as well, while Cole informed us that Alexa ran off immediately after the match ended.

KURT ANGLE & THE DRIFTER BACKSTAGE- meh
I popped huge for The Drifter telling Kurt to put his phone away. You’re on the job, buddy!
The Drifter is upset with Kurt because he wanted another shot at the IC Title but Kurt went ahead and gave the match to his own son instead. The Drifter told Kurt that “that’s blatant favoritism… and that’s not cool.” The Drifter told Kurt that if he wasn’t getting a title shot then there was no one worthy to face him so all the people of Los Angeles will be getting tonight is a musical performance… and Kurt Angle seemed perfectly fine with one of his employees acting like a baby and refusing to wrestle if he didn’t get the match he wanted. At least until The Drifter referred to Jason Jordan as Kurt’s “bastard son.” Once The Drifter did that, Kurt declared that The Drifter would indeed have to wrestle tonight… but he could do his concert, too, because apparently Kurt really does think that booking concerts is a good idea.
One thing I will give them credit for so far is that every single eligible wrestler we have seen tonight has expressed an interest in Roman’s open challenge for the IC Title- including both a wrestler with a leg injury and a guy who just lost an open challenge for the same title last week. Compare this to Smackdown, where only the wrestler (or two, at most) who were going to be involved in the open challenge segment later that night ever even mention the US Title.

THE ZO TRAIN BACKSTAGE- Enzo hypes up tonight’s Cruiserweight four-way by berating his lackeys who lost last week and warning his lackeys who will be wrestling tonight that they had better not lose because their performance is reflects on him. This was fine.
Then the Zo Train left and Nia Jax wandered onto the camera and I was legitimately wondering if she didn’t realize they were filming a segment and just accidentally walked into the way. Then she asked Enzo “how you doin’?” and winked at him and oh my G-d they’re going to pair these two up, and probably for no other reason than (*puts on best Vince voice) “Ha! A small man and a big woman together! Now that’s funny!”

FATAL FOUR-WAY: Mustafa Ali vs. Drew Gulak vs. Tony Nese vs. Cedric Alexander- 7.25/10
When we got back from the commercial, Cole told us that “the ring is filled with Cruiserweights from 205 Live,” which I think is technically not a true statement. Cruiserweights aren’t from 205 Live. They’re from Raw. That’s where they were before there was a 205 Live and they’ve been on Raw every week ever since, too. Also, the way Cole said “Cruiserweights from 205 Live” made it sound like it was the first half of the title of the newest book from WWE Press: Cruiserweights are from 205 Live, Women are from Total Divas.
But yeah. As you can infer from Cole’s statement, none of the men in this important match (the winner faces Rich Swann for a title shot next week) even got their entrance shown. Cole kept wondering what would happen if one the babyfaces got the win here and then had to face his babyface friend Rich Swann next week with a title shot on the line, or if one of the heels won here and then won next week and had to face his leader Enzo for the title the week after. In the heel scenario, Booker all but said that the heel in question would lie down for Enzo if Enzo paid him enough. These guys had a fun, exciting match with Gulak stealing the win in the end. Gulak for champ!

CHARLY CARUSO INTERVIEWS DREW GUALK- She asks him if he has any conflicted feelings about the possibility of facing Enzo for the title. Gulak apparently has a PowerPoint all ready to go to help answer this question, which is also the very question that the announcers spent most of the match asking… but we won’t get to see it because it’s time for a commercial because the Cruiserweights don’t matter. But we can’t even just cut to the commercial, either. We’ve got to reinforce how little the Cruiserweights matter by taking what would have at least been a small amount of time that could have been used to show us just the beginning of Gulak’s answer to this important question, and instead use it to show us The Drifter walking around backstage because he is coming out next, and Elias Sampson drifting around the midcard is much more important than a man who is one win away from earning a shot at the top title in his division.
Wait… no… it’s even worse than it being time to go to a commercial. It’s actually time to plug Total Divas. And this wasn’t a commercial. This was a zoom-in on the announcers with Cole setting the stage for the clip. And in the clip Lana… in her shoot American and totally not Russian accent, is telling all of her friends that her husband Rusev wants to have kids but she isn’t ready yet. Rusev asks if they can not talk about such a private matter in front of the others (Nia, Alexa, and Sheamus).
1. Raise your hand if you give a sh*t about whether or not Lana and Rusev procreate? Yup. Pretty much no one. That’s what I thought.
2. Of the small percentage of Raw’s audience that does care about whether or not these two reproduce together, what are the odds that any of those people are not already regular viewers of Total Divas?
That’s what I thought. I’m sure getting those four people to watch Total Divas is definitely more important than making sure that you don’t totally bury the Cruiserweight Division, especially now that you’re trying to see if you can make money running Cruiserweight house shows.
And on a personal note… just when I thought I had come to accept the fact that they will plug Total Divas on their kayfabe TV show and it will break kayfabe and I’ll just have to live with it, they manage to find a way to do it that makes me angry all over again.
Two years ago they got all pissy at Lana because she broke kayfabe by showing off her new engagement ring on her own personal social media accounts and they decided that Lana doing this meant they had to totally change around their storyline to fit in with this new reality that Lana had supposedly forced on everyone… and now, in 2017, they’ve got her on their dumb reality show that almost no one in their regular TV audience cares about (and yet they still try to force it on us with commercials and intrusive in-show plugs like this one), breaking kayfabe by not only hanging out with the babyface and talking about how the business is a work, but even talking without the Russian accent which is the one identifiable trait her character has, and talking about whether or not she’s ready to have the babies of her husband… the very same husband who they decided they had to make her husband on air due to her previous breach of kayfabe, and yet who they, earlier this year, just randomly decided to not have her interact with or even mention on their kayfabe television show with no explanation for it whatsoever, even though the fact that they were married was a key element in setting up both of Rusev's two most recent feuds, one of which was extremely high-profile. In one f*cking clip they not only broke kayfabe, but also managed to rub in to us just how much they stuck at storytelling by reminding us of this relationship that they made such a big deal over and then dropped with no explanation whatsoever.
They’re not trying to help their product by doing this sh*t, and they’re not even trying to make money, either. They’re just being f*cking control freaks who want to control the lives of their employees and the minds of their fans. Why else would there has been heat on Dean and Renee for getting married quietly so that there would be no Total Divas cameras around? Or why would Lana’s breach of kayfabe be treated like such a crime when they plug their own non-kayfabe show every week during their kayfabe show? Why else would they selectively edit footage to make it appear that Cena won his debut match, or that people who were booing Roman were actually cheering for him, or make it look like Owens & Zayn were the reason Smackdown lost at Survivor Series? Why else would they spend a large chunk of time on every post-Mania or Canadian TV taping telling us that the fans most likely to not react how WWE wants them to react to various characters are just being wacky and having fun and they don’t really mean it? Stupid f*cking motherf*ckers.

And only now are we off to commercial. Why couldn’t Gulak cut a promo again?

THE DRIFTER SINGS- meh.

“THE DRIFTER” ELIAS SAMSON vs. BRAUN STROWMAN- DUD!
To be fair, the only reason I gave this a dud was because there was no DQ for the blatant guitar shot, but the match was a squash so there was no reason for anything like that. Braun then threw the steps into the ring while the referee stood there and did nothing. Maybe I missed the fact that the bell didn’t ring, but that, too, would be idiotic since we had both wrestlers in the ring, engaged in combat with each other and no one was holding any foreign objects so why wouldn’t you ring the bell?
Before Braun could murderize Elias with the steps, Kane’s pyro and music hit, but instead of Kane coming out and them brawling, we got a promo from Kane on the TitanTron, which greatly disappointed the crowd, who thought they were going to see a brawl. Kane then cut a terrible promo (all because of the verbiage. Kane’s delivery was as good as it possibly could be given the crap he had to say) saying that “next week we will step into the abyss, and only one monster will emerge.” I’m not sure what that means other than that they’re going to fight… which is something we’ve seen pretty much every week for the past few weeks.

THE SHIELD BACKSTAGE- terrible.
Roman was slightly douchy to the other two. Seth called him out on this by cutting a bad promo. Then Dean cut a bad comedic promo.

ASUKA vs. ALICIA FOX- 2.5/10
Fox cut an inset promo claiming she wasn’t going to lose like Dana Brooke did. She came off like a total goofball, but she did do better than Dana did by actually getting some offense in on Asuka. Asuka won clean.

POST- MATCH SEGMENT- dull
Just like last week, the Lega-She come out and surround the ring then just let Asuka leave. Paige then cut a promo saying that Fox was her only friend in WWE but she still had her protégés beat Fox up anyway. No one cared.

FINN BALOR vs. BO DALLAS (w/Curtis Axel)- 4.75/10

BRAY WYATT/BROKEN WOKEN MATT HARDY PROMO- Bray is going to feud with Matt Hardy. That should dampen everyone expectations about WWE’s version of the Broken Hardys. They did this by using goofy screen effects to cut back and forth between a Matt promo and a Bray promo. All of it was terrible. The storyline- such as there is one, seems to be that Matt Hardy lost two wrestling matches in a row- something he’s done a million times before in his career- but apparently this time it resulted in either him going crazy or the awakening of an actual eternal spirit that has been possessing him his whole life, so now he’s a goofball. At least when TNA did it, it arose from a situation that you could actually buy would result in Matt having a mental breakdown. This is WWE, where they always try their best to ignore things that have happened elsewhere, and in the few situations that they don’t (such as AJ, Gallows, Balor, & Anderson all being pals) they at least explain it to you in some basic way (“they were pals in Japan”)… and they just send Matt out here to make goofy noises and say goofy things, with no explanation whatsoever.
And then, of course, there are the fans, who all of a sudden care a lot more about Matt Hardy now that he’s making goofy noises and talking about doing sh*t in ancient Egypt and “the Consumer of Terrestrial Entities” (because apparently “Eater of Worlds” didn’t sound stupid enough on its own for Broken Matt Hardy)… and the fans are all cheering and are suddenly a lot more into him than they have been when he was veteran babyface wrestler Matt Hardy, putting on great matches in both singles and tags and being the consummate babyface, because wrestling fans in 2017 don’t care about stories and just things to laugh at and chant. This gimmick is like PWG and Vince Russo had a baby. Well… you’ve gotten what you asked for “wrestling” fans. Enjoy hearing Michael Cole say “Matt Hardy has been woken” with the word “woken” being said in that special tone that wrestling announcers have that is a horrifically patronizing mixture of “remember this word because it’s very important” and “doesn’t this sound so interesting?” every three minutes for at least the next year or so.

WWE RAW TAG TEAM TITLE MATCH: Sheamus & Cesaro(c) vs. Seth Rollins & Dean Ambrose- 7/10
They were well on their way to having a great match when the heels intentionally got themselves disqualified for having two guys in the ring for more than five seconds, which might well be the first time someone has ever gotten DQed for that. This was done just so Kurt could come out and restart it without DQs so that it wouldn’t be a DQ when Samoa Joe ran in and attacked The Shield. Joe, of course, attacked Roman’s friends as a way of getting revenge on Roman for what Roman did to him when they last interacted, which was earlier tonight when Roman… um… almost got choked out by Joe and was only saved by Jason Jordan.
Roman jogged out to make the save. Yes, “jogged.” His best friends and brothers-in-arms are outnumbered three-on-two due to illegal interference in a title match they’re about to be screwed out of, and Roman can’t even put in the effort run down to the ring to help them. Roman chased Joe away, but was too slow to get back to prevent the winning pinfall.
I hated this finish for several reasons. First and foremost was the interference. As I said above, I really don’t understand what Joe’s motivation was here, other than “I am a heel in a feud with Roman and thus I must somehow find a way to bother Roman,” which, if you don’t have a precipitating situation such as the heel feeling in some way wronged or having his/her pride wounded and thus feeling a need to avenge the perceived wrong, will almost always feel forced (a bully heel would be an example of an exception to this and it is important to note the distinction between something like this and a heel coming out to insult the babyface and brag about his/her most recent victory in the war between them, but even that is almost always verbal [at least at first] and almost always directed at the babyface the heel is feuding with rather than his/her friends). As I said above, Joe seems to lack that motivation to me, which is a major component to my objection to Joe’s interference here.
Another- more minor but still significant- issue I have with Joe’s interference here is the characterization. Even if he had the missing motivation, “I’m going to hit your friends a few times to cost them a title match, then run away when you come to fight me” does not seem like the way Samoa Joe would try to take his revenge on a babyface. The way Joe would do would be direct, in your face, and not shying from a fight. A wonderful example of this is exactly what he tried to do to Roman Reigns earlier in the night, and what he did eventually do to Jason Jordon earlier in the night.
I also feel that the stop-start nature of the restart hurt the match but putting in a pointless lull in the action. Why kill the moment of the match only to start it up again, and then end it abruptly with the real finish? Even worse, it was all completely unnecessary. If you’re going to protect Seth & Dean by having Joe’s interference be the thing that costs them the match then what does it matter is Sheamus & Cesaro get themselves DQed and Kurt orders the match restarted first? And the way they chose to go about doing the DQ was even worse. It’s never good when a referee all of a sudden decides to call for a DQ enforce a rule that is rarely ever enforced that strictly just for the sake of doing the finish you want, and it’s even worse when doing so technically benefits the babyfaces (yes, it means that they don’t get the titles, but they’d still get the winners’ share of the purse, and should be guaranteed another title shot soon because not only did they beat win a title match, but because the heels seemingly got intentionally disqualified in order to make sure they lost in a way that meant they didn’t lose the belts).
A much better way to do this would have been to just have Joe interfere behind the referee’s back. This would not only prevent the referee from calling for a DQ for something that DQs are almost never called for, but it would also explain why Joe didn’t just keep beating up The Shield and why Roman wouldn’t be able to catch him: because he’s trying to hide from the referee rather than running away from Roman (and Roman not catching him still yields the same result of Joe escaping with his heat).

But why did Joe have to interfere at all? If your goal is to protect Seth & Dean, why not just have Cesaro & Sheamus cheat to beat them via something like a weapon or a low blow or illegal leverage? WWE’s thought process was doubtlessly “this finish protects Seth & Dean and gives them reason to have a rematch and gets more heat on Joe.” To that I say that the heat here would have been more effective if it had been on Sheamus & Cesaro rather than on Joe because Joe didn’t need this heat. He already has his heat from earlier tonight when he attacked Jason Jordan and from when he tried to attack Roman only after Roman had been through a twenty-minute match, and he still has his heat from the previous week when he waited until Roman had finished a match before jumping him from behind and choking him out.

Finally, I’m quite disappointed by the fact that this feud is still going on. I do think that Seth & Dean should come out of it with the belts, but I'm quite frankly sick and of tired of this feud at this point, so seeing it dragged out any longer than necessary is not something I am looking forward to (if Seth and Dean had won here we could have had one more match which would be Sheamus & Cesaro’s rematch where Seth & Dean would win clean to end the feud; this finish means we’ll need at least two more to end it). These guys have been facing off basically every week since the end of July, and it’s now early December. Even with the Hardys and The Revival out of the picture due to injuries, this is a roster that also includes a criminally underused Gallows & Anderson, plus potential teams like Titus & Crews or a “veterans out for one last shot at glory like the Hardys got” team of Rhyno & Goldust that could have been built up to challenge given a bit of actual work from the Creative team.
But instead we just got Sheamus & Cesaro vs. Rollins & Ambrose, either in singles or tags or trios or a goofy 5-on-3 TLC match, week after week, month after month.
I mean… they had a perfectly logical opportunity to set Bo & Axel up for a title shot. I’m not saying they should have done that on PPV and I’m not even saying that they should have spent time trying to convince us that Bo & Axel were anything resembling a real threat to beat Seth & Dean cleanly. Just make a three-week storyline out of it where Miz negotiates the title shot and the idea is that Miz’s interference could cost Seth & Dean the titles but Seth & Dean persevere and pick up the win, with either Roman Reigns or Jason Jordan (depending on the timing) coming out to stop Miz from interfering so that Seth & Dean can then defeat Bo & Axel.
Or how about Cena and Roman as a team? If the underlying premise of their whole worked-shoot is that the company wants them to be the two babyface posterchildren of the company then it makes logical sense that the company wouldn’t want them to come out and trash each other on the air, right? So all you’d have to do is have Kurt come out in the middle of one of their early exchanges and say that he has “been instructed” to book them in a tag title match tonight, with the idea being that the company thinks that having a shared goal to work towards will give them incentive to be friends instead of having a public dick-measuring contest. And you don’t even have to pin one of them going into their match against each other. Just have Roman try to spear one them on the outside while Cena is the legal man and have Roman accidentally nail Cena when Seth or Dean moves out of the way, causing a count-out. It’s not that great of a finish and it’s certainly not what I would do if I were booking (I’d have a Cena/Reigns miscue result in Seth pinning Roman to put another piece in place for the story of “whenever Seth and Roman face off with a title on the line, Seth always wins” to set up a Universal Title match between them down the road), but it builds to the Cena vs. Roman match just fine and protects them both, and- back to my larger point- at least it would break up the freakin’ monotony that has been this tag division for almost half a year now! (And this is a situation that not been helped by an almost identical problem in the tag division over on Smackdown, as Usos vs. New Day started in the end of May and has been going on pretty much non-stop since then despite them having had a Hell in a Cell match that was billed as the final blow-off almost two months ago!)

Okay… that got me on quite the fantasy-booking roll so expect some stuff out of me in the next week or two. As for Raw, it started off really freakin’ great, then fell off a cliff. But G-d damn the first half of this show RULED.

STUPID ANNOUNCER QUOTES:
1. Booker T- “He just the same move four times in a row. That tells me that this young man is just trying anything.”
Booker impressively manages to be wrong in both the idiomatic sense and the literal sense of this phrase, as “just trying anything” is a sign of desperation; like you’re grasping at straws trying to find something that will work, and the fact that Jason Jordan has found something quite effective and is, as Graves pointed out, in control of the match, shows that Booker’s statement is false. Booker is also wrong if taken literally because if he keeps doing the same exact move he’s trying the same thing over and over again, which is pretty much the opposite of “trying anything.”

2. Michael thinks that Paige actually has a good argument for her claim that she started the Women’s/Divas Revolution. The evidence Cole brings to support this claim is that “Paige won her first championship the night after WrestleMania: her debut on Monday Night Raw.”
I am completely baffled as to what the fact that she won her first championship the night she debuted or the fact that said win and debut took place on a post-WrestleMania Raw have to do with whether or not she started Branding Catchphrase #4.
Also, why is this even a question? Don’t Cole and Paige and the rest of the Paige-erous Alliance know that it was our wise and benevolent mother-goddess Queen Stephanie who gave us the Divas-Retconned-into-Women’s Revolution? I remember it like it was yesterday. Despite having had a long, hard day of decreeing the Nineteenth Amendment, she was still strong and empowered enough to appear to us in our moment of need, when there were Bella Twins on the TV and she spake and saideth “let there be Charlotte!” and there was Charlotte. Then she spoketh again and said “let there be Becky!” and there was Becky. Then she spoketh a third time and declared “let there be Sasha!” and there was Sasha.

3. Booker tried to put Mandy Rose over by telling a story about a time Mandy suffered some sort of injury to her hand during a competition on Tough Enough, saying “and she didn’t even finish the competition. That shows me how tough Mandy Rose is.”
Ummm… Booker? You do realize that not finishing the competition makes her look the opposite of tough, right?

4. Cole tried to say that Alexa and Sasha were equals because they are each four-time champions, and insisted that they were equal even when both Alexa and Graves pointed out to him that Sasha has never once successfully defended the title while Alexa has done so many times.

5. Michael Cole (about Bo Dallas & Curtis Axel)- “they’ve never had this much notoriety in their careers at this level since they joined The Miz.”
This would include the time when Curtis Axel was one of Paul Heyman’s charges and was the Intercontinental Champion.

I've actually somewhat come to the conclusion that Booker T is supposed to be the real, ridiculous, just talking ridiculous shit for the sake of ridiculous shit, to rile the other announcers up, heel. The real pure announcer heel. It's just his style of speaking and tones of voice don't always exactly give it away not go with it, and I know it's somewhat reaching lol, but it's about all I can muster from it all.

I'm just watching this week's RAW right now,
and the Elias vs. Strowman "match?" just took place and left me thinking... "Uhhhhh... where did the match go? What just happened? Wuz there an opening bell or a referee or anything? Uhhhhh..." So I specifically sought out the BRM official RAW review, but still my question iz unanswered az I'm sure U feel the same way. WTF happened there?
Elias wuz seeking good competition and received an assault with a referee hanging around for no reazon rather than a match? This iz the same kind of BS that bugged me in the attitude era. This kind of thing would happen all the time back in '99. Total confuzion. No rulez. No sense.

I've actually somewhat come to the conclusion that Booker T is supposed to be the real, ridiculous, just talking ridiculous shit for the sake of ridiculous shit, to rile the other announcers up, heel. The real pure announcer heel. It's just his style of speaking and tones of voice don't always exactly give it away not go with it, and I know it's somewhat reaching lol, but it's about all I can muster from it all.

Hey, from what I've seen over the past couple months, I'm starting to think that management iz finally loosening the chainz on the commentatorz and allowing them more freedom. They seem to be getting less and less contrived, and more and more random and unpredicable. I LIKE it!!!